yes i updated bios around 2 months ago as i bought a duel layer dvd and my motherboard wouldnt recognise it.i updated to version 2.40. but now have updated to version 2.60. Having said that i did go out and buy a new motherboard but still got the same. froze before the F8 screen???. tried my hard drives on another pc and it installed straight away. changed my radeon to a gforce still the same.I have 3 sticks of ram which i also tried individuly.
tried new ide cables. Tried low level format with maxtors own program.i also tried different power supply. The only thing left i wud say now is the cpu. which by the way i have overclocked to 2 gig from 1.6 for the past year or so.the cpu is a amd duron 1600.
hope i have covered everything here for you.
hope this can be sorted one way or the other.
thanks for you help
jon